[Geotools-devel] Moving code from GeoServer to GeoTools

[Ben Caradoc-D. <Ben...@cs...>]

[Repurposing and renaming a thread from geotools-users:]

On 13/05/12 16:49, Andrea Aime wrote:
> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 4:03 AM, Michael Bedward
> <mic...@gm...>  wrote:
>> Thanks for the pointer to the GeoServer legend creation code David. If
>> acceptable, and feasible, it would be really useful to move this into
>> GeoTools at some stage - perhaps to sit in gt-main or gt-render.
>
> Sure. GeoServer has a history of contributing back to GeoTools everything that
> is not network service specific, so I believe you backporting the legend code
> and making it useful for other apps too would be something welcomed indeed

The only formality is that, because GeoServer is a GPL project and 
GeoTools is an LGPL project, moving code from GeoServer to GeoTools 
requires the agreement of TOPP (or the original contributor). The code 
must be a new contribution to avoid contaminating GeoTools with the 
requirements of the GPL. Using TOPP means not having to track down the 
original authors.

This kind of cross-project refactoring is a good thing, but in my view 
we need to preserve the separation of licences. For example, I can't 
just grab a chunk of GeoServer and commit it into the GeoTools repo and 
say "whatever, it is all open source".

I am tempted to treat OpenGeo staff as being able to approve this, but I 
am not a lawyer and I don't know if TOPP and OpenGeo are as 
indistinguishable as I would like to pretend. Could this be as easy as 
making sure an OpenGeo employee approves the transfer by making a 
comment on the Jira issue for the GeoTools patch based on GeoServer? 
Would this be sufficient to make the GeoTools patch a new contribution 
assigned to OSGeo?

Chris, would you care to comment?

Kind regards,

-- 
Ben Caradoc-Davies <Ben...@cs...>
Software Engineer
CSIRO Earth Science and Resource Engineering
Australian Resources Research Centre